Articles
A dead whale washes ashore on an island: what to do?
Christmas Day in the Cranberry Isles arrived with winds high enough to cause ferry cancelations, though the air temperature was unseasonably mild. Fortunately for us, our family had arrived two days earlier. In a rare event that might occur once in five years, both of our sons came home to the island for Christmas at
Love that duff
Yesterday, I stopped in to see my mother-in-law, to check on how she was doing on the fourth day of the power outage after last weekend’s storm. I also wanted a recipe for this column. Anna Fernald is a “people person” and her home, in the center of the island, is a magnet for visitors. Chances were
The year of the woman: a stern woman remembers
A few weeks ago, when I was about to unload the groceries from my car in Northeast Harbor, I got a call on my cell phone from my husband Bruce. “I’m on my way over to drop Paul [his sternman] in Northeast; are you anywhere near the dock? I’ll give you a ride back.” I
Time to ask, ‘How was your summer?’
When September begins I am filled with converse emotions. I am relieved to have a break from being so very busy and I revel in the time alone, while at the same time I bump around my little island life feeling such poignance and thinking, “Now what do I do?” Every year, just before Labor
Fore me! Golf cart dream comes true
Used golf carts are one of the handiest modes of seasonal land transportation in the Cranberry Isles. They are a lot of fun to drive, have a top speed of about 12 mph, use very little gas, and I have wanted one for a very long time. I wrote about how close I thought I
The burning island question: ‘Could you put it on the boat?’
The first thing many people assume about living on an island without a bridge is that you can still get here by car. There is no car ferry to the Cranberry Isles, yet we have plenty of cars and trucks and golf carts on both Little and Great Cranberry Islands. “How do they get here?”
It’s June 1, so let me the first to say, ‘Happy New Year!’
Ten days into winter I am usually ready to kick the old year to the curb, but life really does not feel all that different on the first day of January than it did on the last day of December. Other than feeling relieved that the stress of the holidays is over and writing a
Putting on my ‘city’ is hard work
For the past few years I have taken two trips to New York in the spring—one in April, to see my best friend Susie, who lives in Rye, and the other in June, when Bruce and I have been guests of our friends Dan and Cynthia at a fund raising gala hosted by their son
Record set straight–Richard Alley gets Bronze Star
ISLESFORD — Students from the Ashley Bryan School usually go to the Bar Harbor YMCA on Friday afternoons for their swimming lessons. But on Friday, May 2, they changed their schedule so they could return to Islesford on the 11 a.m. boat. Morning talk among island lobster fishermen on the VHF radio was also about
Powerless–a kind of March madness
Our stormy winter blended into a wet windy spring in the Cranberry Isles. Like most places, we experienced a few power outages, but throughout the winter they were the result of electricity being cut off on the mainland rather than any island specific damages. When the lights go out on the islands, one of the